Sunday, January 17, 2016

It's still not an alien megastructure, but the strangely-dimming sun known as Tabby's Star isn't being occasionally occluded by comets.

KIC 8462852, to use its formal designation, gave
UFO-spotters a veritable hypegasm last year, because the odd
fluctuations in its brightness were hard to explain.

When Penn State University boffins used Tabby's Star
as an example of the characteristics we might expect of a star
surrounded by a Ringworld*-like megastructure, the headlines went crazy. Killjoys at NASA damped that down in November, saying it's more likely that the start twinkles because it's orbited by a swarm of comets.

Saturday, January 16, 2016

Of the more than 150,000 stars under constant observation during the four years of NASA’s primary Kepler Mission
(2009-2013), this one stands alone for the inexplicable dips in its
light. While almost certainly naturally-caused, some have suggested we
consider other possibilities.

Physicists around the world were puzzled recently when an unusual bump appeared in the signal of the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, causing them to wonder if it was a new particle previously unknown, or perhaps even two new particles. The collision cannot be explained by the Standard Model, the theoretical foundation of particle physics.

Sunday, January 10, 2016

1. yahoo search (yeah I'm old school)2. "how to force Flash objects to a certain volume when they appear in the volume mixer"3. results from yahoo4. first result: http://blog.nirsoft.net/2011/02/25/how-to-control-the-volume-level-of-specific-application-from-command-line-on-windows-72008vista/5. Winner winner chicken dinner! Hope it works on Win10

Saturday, January 09, 2016

Automatic Screenshotter is a portable tool which saves images of your desktop at regular intervals.

The basics of the program work much as you'd expect. It adds an icon to your system tray, you use this to choose a capture frequency, then to start capturing, and the program begins to save PNGs of your desktop.